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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

It's about that time. Time for sweaters, hot cocoa, spiced apple cider and watching the leaves tumble off the trees in our front yards. Yes, friends, I think it's safe to say Fall is officially here.

Last night I was goofing around with a couple of card designs and decided I wanted to make a Fall-inspired card. Of course, for me the biggest (and first sign) of Fall is the changing colors of foilage and the piles of leaves that seem to end up on the doorstop quite mysteriously. The colors of Fall are a marvelous palette for cardmaking.

I used my Making Memories paper trimmer to cut down my Bazzill cardstock, my K & Co. decorative paper and brown kraft paper. I used my Scor-Pal to score my cardstock at 4.25" to create a bi-fold card base. I fell in love with the fall leaves design by Johnny Yanok in the K & Co. mat pad. It was the inspiration for the Cuttlebug die-cut leaves.

Using my Cuttlebug and the 2" x 6" die, I cut two sets of leaves out of the brown kraft paper. I wasn't sure how many leaves I was going to use on the card, but I figured having two sets gave me more wiggle room to play. The leaf shapes I cut (two of each) looked like this:

I used a little trick (which I may share one day) to decorate the leaf fronts. It basically consists of using a white resist ink pen to make miscellaneous doodle designs on the the leaves. After I've made the freehand designs, I used Prismacolor markers to put two to three coats of color on top of the white resist. I think the effect is very eye-catching and gives the piece a bit of whimsy and visual interest.

I used my ATG 714 adhesive gun to adhere the decorative paper to the front of my card. I then deicided that three leaves were plenty for the front of my card. I chose one shape in each of the three marker colors I used. I used my very favorite mini pop dots from All Night Media to attach the leaves to the card front. The mini pop dots give the piece a lot of dimensionality (which unfortunately is difficult to capture in photographs.

As for placing the leaves on the card, you just need to use your eye and experiment with different positions (obviously before you put your adhesive dots on). I found three leaves of various colors worked best. Once I found the layout I liked, it was easy to finish up the card. The only other element I added was a border of Sakura clear glitter pen along the edges of the decorative paper element. A couple of views of the finished look:

This card makes me want to run and jump into a giant pile of multi-colored leaves. Of course, it might be safer to wait until the leaves have actually fallen from the trees in my yard.